By Lauren Brown

Collage by Catherine Nichols

Senior Joelle Salmon arrived last spring in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, ready to gut a home submerged and ruined by Hurricane Katrina. She helped remove the mattress that had fl oated from its bed to block the front door and hauled out rotted, stinking clothes and shoes, furniture and even graded school papers.

The groceries left behind in the fridge by the owners who fled the 2005 storm had turned toxic, as had the water in the toilet. Mold was everywhere.

Then Salmon tripped over a toolbox holding up a bed upstairs, and the fetid water held inside for 30 months spilled out.

“Katrina, until then, was a foreign concept,” she says. “I always thought I was aware of world problems. Then my bubble was burst.”

Salmon is an avid supporter of and participant in Maryland’s Alternative Breaks program, which expanded this year from spring breaks to those in the winter and summer.

Sponsored by the Adele H. Stamp Student Union Center for Campus Life, the program links students interested in social issues such as disaster relief, HIV/AIDS and environmental sustainability with communities across the country, the Caribbean and South America. They spend a week fulfi lling those communities’ needs while getting engaged in learning in a meaningful way.

In other words, this is not the traditional spring break spent sprawled on the beach.

“I believe that this program is helping students to connect with their passion,” says Craig Slack, the university’s assistant director in the Stamp Student Union for leadership and community service learning. “It’s providing students with life experiences that complement their lessons in the classroom.”

The program was launched in spring 2004 with three trips and about three dozen students, he said. This spring, more than 250 students will participate in 17 trips to 16 destinations, including New York City, the Bahamas and San Francisco.

The concept has been gaining traction nationwide as well. Break Away, the largest national organization dedicated to developing alternative break programs, estimates that 48,000 students in the United States participated in alternative spring breaks in 2007.

“From what we know, alternative programs started in the 1980s and have grown steadily ever since,” says Samantha Giacobozzi, programs director at the Atlanta-based nonprofi t.“Universities and colleges have taken more interest in offering these experiences to these students.

“The students we meet are interested in learning in the world around them, and that’s tied to their interest in social justice, active citizenship and being involved in their community,” she says.

That was the case for junior David Zuckerman, who had no interest in a typical spring break. He went to New Orleans his freshman year, and last year he traveled to Lima, Peru, where his team painted a large community center and day care in an impoverished neighborhood.

He says he initially thought, “It’s going to push me out of my comfort zone and I could learn a lot. And I did. The trip is not necessarily about effecting change, but education—what we would bring back, and how we would broaden our horizons from an international perspective.”

This spring, Zuckerman’s going to be a program leader, helping to organize the logistics of a trip. He’s also hoping to fi nagle time off from an internship to participate in a third alternative break in Washington, D.C. He says that out of 18 participants on his 2008 trip, seven are now in leadership positions in the program.

The leadership aspect is key to alternative breaks, says Mei-Yen Hui, graduate assistant coordinator of community service learning. While she organizes the yearlong schedule of recruiting, selecting participants and 16-week training sessions, she says student trip leaders learn to “own the experience” by taking charge—researching the social issue, connecting with community organizations, arranging the itinerary and lining up speakers on the social issue they’re addressing.

Besides the participants and trip leaders, a student or faculty advisor joins each team to handle the money, sign paperwork and support the students, even while working alongside them.

Laura Barrantes, program coordinator for Student Entertainment Events, served as a staff advisor on last spring’s trip to the Oglala Lakota reservation in Pine Ridge, S.D. During this immersion in American Indian culture, participants crafted several bunk beds for children who were sleeping on floors and worked on the homes of three tribal elders. Amid winds whipping across the plains and 30-degree temperatures, they built an access ramp for disabled people and painted and re-sided exteriors. In their free time, they toured a school, a restaurant and trading posts on the reservations and visited the Badlands and Wounded Knee.

Barrantes says she’d return in a heartbeat: “My eyes have been widened. I’m using a much more critical eye when it comes to Native American issues.”

Salmon goes a step further, calling the program “lifechanging,” a description used by many participants. One of the founders of the new winter alternative break, she says she keeps in contact with team members from her previous trips and some of the people she met on her trips to New Orleans—a city that she loves and hates. She says she plans to move there someday and that the program has drawn her to Teach for America, a prospect she never considered before.

“I know I can help other people,” she says. “I know how I can serve.”

Students contribute to the cost of their trip, with the university covering the bulk of it. That’s part of why organizers limit the number of participants—but it also has its advantages, in that it creates a more intimate and thoughtful learning experience. Organizers also say they would love to meet the demand for alternative breaks from everyone—from students to staff and faculty.

“It will take a community effort to ensure that everyone who wants an alternative break experience can have one,” Stack says. “Leadership is not the responsibility of one. It’s the responsibility of all.” TERP

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